July 3, 2014 by Justin Leighty · Comments Off on ESCAPE RV Catching Up After Major Launch

Dan George took an unusual path into the RV industry, but since the launch of Wisconsin-based ESCAPE RV late last year, he’s been amazed by the response to the company’s park model RVs.

“I’ve been in the resort business for over 20 years and started using the architecture design you see in ESCAPE 20 years ago in stick-built buildings at a resort called Canoe Bay. We started to look at whether we could make the architecture available to people who fell in love with it,” said George, founder and CEO of ESCAPE RV.

“What you see in Escape is actually a culmination in about 20 years of experience and design. We come at it from the campground/resort owner design side. We don’t come at it from the RV side,” he explained. “We want to make this as beautiful as we can make it.”

The popularity obliterated plans for an orderly roll-out, he said. “We’ve been hit by a tsunami. We didn’t know — I suppose we should have, given our experience — we didn’t know how people would react on a large scale. That design has a very visceral reaction to it. We have people who come from all over the country to northwest Wisconsin to see this and buy it. It’s a very unique product, obviously,” he explained. “We’re using the exact same crews, master carpenter, master plumber, master electrician, who have worked with us for 20 years.”

They’ve appeared in design magazines in Sweden, Germany, the United Kingdom, France, South Africa, Japan and China, George said. “We have people from all over the world who want a unit, and that’s a lot of logistics. We had an e-mail from the prime minister of Aruba who wants us to get him a unit,” George said.

ESCAPE RV recently joined the Recreation Vehicle Industry Association (RVIA) as a park model RV (PMRV) member. “We became an RVIA certified manufacturer, we felt that was very important. RVIA is the voice of the business. We wanted to be part of that,” George said.

“A lot of people, they’ve never heard of a park model. What they see si a building. Rather than seeing an RV, they see a building,” he said. “It’s on a different level, it comes from a different place. People who’ve looked at it see a building. Some of that is the detail, the long overhangs, the soffitting, the trim and the craftsmanship that go into it. For a small building, it is very detailed,” he said.

“Form and function should be one, we believe that. It’s airy, it feels large. We’re not trying to jam as much as we possibly can into the smallest possible space,” George said. “I love small spaces used efficiently.”

With the initial furor out of the way, George said, “We’re now back to getting ahead of the game. A month ago we moved into a brand-new assembly facility. We’ve got all the logistics in place, now we’re moving along. We’re still dealing with some of the backlog,” he said.